An Old Agricultural School Has Come A Long Way, Baby

September 06, 1991|By KATHERINE FARRISH; Courant Staff Writer

STORRS — C One hundred years ago, a handful of women slipped into classes at the Storrs Agricultural School when a sympathetic principal disregarded a state law that officially reserved the school for men.

The women currently attending the school, now the University of Connecticut, have it a little easier; they just have to get passing grades and find the money to pay for tuition.

But officials celebrating 100 years of women at UConn are making sure today's students remember those pioneers during what has been declared "The Year of the Woman." At the annual convocation to start the academic year Thursday, nearly every speaker was a woman who invoked the memory of the first female students.

The main speaker was Regina R. Barreca, an associate professor of English at UConn who has written "They Used to Call Me Snow White ... But I Drifted," a book on the use of humor by women.

To a crowd of more than 800 students, faculty and staff members in Jorgensen Auditorium -- about evenly divided between the sexes -- Barreca urged the women present to resist passivity in their education and their lives.

Do not give up any control of your life without a struggle, Barreca said, even if it might be safer to rely on someone else.

"Not taking any risks, as far as I'm concerned, is what could be called having a `near-life' experience. ... You sort of go through the motions but don't go anywhere," she said.

When students are in the library or just walking about campus, they should realize they are lucky to be at UConn, Barreca said.

"I want you to especially consider the ways that women -- of all classes, races and religions -- have been denied access to positions not only of privilege and power but of possibility," she said.

Women were admitted in 1891 when Principal Benjamin F. Koons looked the other way, said Cynthia Herbert Adams, a UConn professor. In 1893, the General Assembly adopted a measure that legally allowed for their enrollment.

Adams has been collecting information about the early women students from their descendants she has been able to locate. Adams

said she has begun feeling a connection to the women as she hears tales of the marriages, children and deaths that followed their years in Storrs.